The team at Sun behind OpenSolaris has unleashed OpenSolaris 2009.06 upon the world. This new release comes packed with new features, changes, improvements, and fixes, and is the first release of OpenSolaris for SPARC, adding support for UltraSPARC T1, T2 (Sun4v), and UltraSPARC II, III and IV (Sun4u). Read on for some of the improvements that stand out.

Interestingly: while hardware support is limited compared to Linux, the kernel that supports more devices -- with a big variance in the quality of device drivers -- than any other operating system kernel, OpenSolaris has shown that hardware support can be greatly improved in very short time when you got the talent, right people and some money. For any observer who has been involved in kernel development, the progress with OpenSolaris has been actually quite amazing in this area. All in all, this is a good example that the "superior" hardware support in Linux is not written in the wall and similar results can be achieved with proper engineering practices.

For the performance-related comment: I can not seriously think what you were after here. Our experiences at work have been exactly the opposite.

All my observations were made comparing the current version of Open Solaris to the current version of Ubuntu and the final beta (Since they keep pushing the date up) of Fedora Core 11.

I have all 3 installed on separate hard drives in my Dell 755 and I tested the same things on all three.

1. Boot times
2. Hardware drivers and ability to use the hardware
3. Included software
4. Ability to use the machine for day to day work
5. Machine speed after boot

The conclusions are what I saw from these simple tests.

I mean as you see my screen name is Windows sucks but I am man enough to say that even though I would trust my machines to Fedora or Ubuntu over Windows. Windows 7 runs better then Fedora 11, Ubuntu 9.04 and Open Solaris combined. That is just facts from running the current beta of Windows 7 on the same machine.